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Six rules to get the most out of fitness & wellness tracking
Self quantification is the trend that just keeps on going. There's an ever-expanding world of wellness wearables and fitness trackers targeting consumers Are your New Year resolutions to be more active making you wonder if it's worth investing in a wellness wearable? Read on for help to keep your head amid the hype and find the best signal in noisy fitness data...
The category promise is that by tracking more and more bodily signals we’ll generate the data that helps make the correlations that drive preventative medicine — so the hope is the tech will get better and better at nudging users towards healthier lifestyles, including by being able to detect possible health problems earlier than our reactive healthcare systems currently do. By serving up “personalized” test results they’re positioning themselves to flog their users quasi treatments, too — whether it be diet advice or vitamin supplements, or even a consultation with a qualified medical professional (for a fee) — cross-selling other products and services to address user-specific needs their proprietary tech has apparently picked up in your data/bodily fluids (but without any requirement to show evidence that would convince a regulator). An interesting confluence of factors we’ve touched on in our Six Rules could end up shaping the next big evolutionary leap in wearables — namely this trio: Accuracy issues; privacy concerns; and a push for greater efficiency of biomarker data processing, including to allow for more powerful software to be housed in smaller physical devices we may carry on our person.
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